by Xiao Bai
That interrogation may have seemed even more brutal than the previous ones had been. Cheng actually came up to him and slapped him on the face. But the questions themselves were run-of-the-mill, and he had been asked them all before. Growing impatient, Lin became brusque with his interrogators, which only made his questioning look more violent.
He barely slept that night. He kept thinking through the conversations of the previous day, trying to absorb them. The storeroom seemed sultrier and the corner he was leaning against narrower than it had been.
Early the next morning, a black Ford did come to pick him up. He didn’t see Comrade Cheng again. (Comrade Cheng—that was how he had taken to thinking of Cheng, ten hours later.) Two young operatives handed him over to the armed policemen, one of whom was, surprisingly, a foreigner. Lin had taken two years of English classes in college, but when he asked the foreigner a question in English, the man smiled and didn’t answer. Producing a pencil stub, he wrote a few words on the back of a piece of cigarette foil and handed it to Lin:
For we went,
Changing our country
More often than our shoes,
Through the class war.
Unbeknownst to Lin, this was a poem by Brecht. The policeman told him it was a poem by a German poet who supported the Comintern, and that he had just translated it into English.
The car took him to a shih-k’u-men house on Rue Wantz. Lin immediately recognized the man standing beneath the ceiling fan in the living room. “Secretary Ch’en!” Many years ago, Lin had sat in the audience when Ch’en had been speaking on the podium as the leader of the Student Communists.
Several hours later, as he was leaving the house, he had to make himself calm down and not get too worked up. His world had been turned upside down. This is a conspiracy, a threat to the Party! If Ku pulls this off, it will be a blow to the Revolution. We must expose and defeat him—this is the mission with which the Party is entrusting you.
Four whole years, he had spent four years under the leadership of a mere charlatan whom he had taken to be a representative of the Party, his only connection to the Party, his mentor. He had lost touch with the Party after the massacres in the spring of 1927. All his comrades were arrested or had dropped out of the Party, and the most important person in his life—not that he had ever had a chance to express his feelings to her—was killed by a blow to the head by a Green Gang thug wielding a baton. When he returned to Shanghai from Wuxi in November of 1927, Year 16 of the Republic, his friends’ revolutionary fervor had died down. In March, a classmate from his hometown had come to see him, and spent half an hour talking about the struggle against imperialism and the warlords before saying: my uncle used to be a teacher in Wuxi, but he’s unemployed. You couldn’t get him a job somewhere, could you? With your position as a Communist on the Kuomintang’s Student District Committee? At the time, all schools were governed by a Kuomintang department consisting of representatives from both parties.
But now that classmate ignored Lin and pretended not to know him when they ran into each other on the street. Lin had thought of going to Wuhan to meet up with Party members there, but the persecution of Communists soon spread to Wuhan. He was not angry at the enemy. No, he hated the enemy—he was angry at all his former comrades who had betrayed the cause.
That was when he had met Ku Fu-kuang. He had been coming out of a lonely bookstore which, only months ago, had been full of socialist books and magazines in several languages. The Shanghai Kuomintang hadn’t yet been able to shut it down because it was in the International Settlement, and the owner was a German. At the time, he could tell that he was in danger, though in retrospect he could see that the true danger was not what he had feared. Someone was looking at him. He went into the longtang, and as he turned the corner, he glanced over and met the gaze of two men looking at him. Tensing up, he walked faster, and he thought he could hear footsteps behind him. Ku was hiding in the alley. He said in a low voice: “This way!” Lin followed him into a shih-k’u-men house, through the courtyard, and out another door.
Now that he thought about it, after hearing Comrade Cheng’s anecdote, he realized that the entire incident could have been a crude trap.
He was ashamed of having been so gullible. He had fallen for it because he had been full of hatred, anxious to exact revenge on the counterrevolutionaries. But his enemy was the system, the class, and hatred is a dangerous emotion for a revolutionary. He had to outdo the enemy in staying power. Just thinking about Secretary Ch’en’s words filled him with shame.
When Lin requested formal readmission to the Party, Secretary Ch’en told him that the Party had learned its lesson from the violence of the oppression. Its ranks had to be more disciplined, and Party members would have stricter requirements to fulfill. That meant that procedures for rejoining the Party would also be tightened. Most importantly, Lin had a mission to complete and no time to lose. He had to tell the truth to his comrades who had been duped by Ku, and tell them that the Party would welcome their return.
Lin stood at the window and waved at the man in the teahouse on the other side of the road, who was carrying a classified document that would explain the Party’s latest strategy to his misled comrades. But first he had to talk to them all and expose Ku’s fraudulent schemes.
He looked at Hsueh, who was fast asleep on the bed. There was one more thing he had to know: what happened at North Gate Police Station. When Secretary Ch’en had asked him about Hsueh, Lin had been amazed that the Party seemed to know everything about everything. Their mole in the Political Section said that Hsueh had an unusual position there because of his ties to Inspector Maron’s new detective squad. The Party had arranged for a sum of money to be deposited in an account at the National Industrial Bank, and earmarked for dealing with corrupt policemen in the Concession. Party leaders were taking an interest in the new detective squad. Another undercover comrade, a clerk at the National Industrial Bank counter on Rue du Consulat, discovered by chance that this Hsueh had withdrawn some money from the account. The Party investigated Hsueh, and decided that he was not a counterrevolutionary. He had rescued Leng because of their relationship, and Leng’s deceitfulness didn’t mean that she had betrayed the Party or gone over to the police’s side.
Lin had Ch’in wake Hsueh up for dinner. As he was serving Hsueh a piece of smoked fish, Lin asked: “So what happened this morning at the Astor? And tell us about the delivery last night. What is the mysterious weapon?”
“How is she? Therese?”
“We don’t know yet. Our man stationed at the scene says she was rushed to Shanghai General Hospital by hotel staff. You have to tell us everything. Ku might well be sending someone to the hospital to kill her.”
“I don’t know anything. You should talk to Leng.”
CHAPTER 50
JULY 13, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.
11:55 P.M.
Park sat on the concrete with his back to the gravestone. It was the grave of a Jesuit who had come to Shanghai at the end of the Ching Dynasty, in the Foreigners’ Cemetery on Rue Gaston Kahn, and it was oval shaped, a meter deep in the ground, and made of concrete. A south wind from Chao-chia Creek carried the stench of boatloads of night soil toward them. The stench only grew worse when the wind died down. Ting-hsin Dye Factory lay across the road on Rue Gaston Kahn, and a chili factory lay to the north.
They all arrived separately within five minutes of each other, so as not to attract police attention. Park looked at his watch. He turned to Fu and said, “It’s time.” Then he led them out of the cemetery through a gap in the wall.
The moon hung low in the sky, the summer night was crowded with stars, and the sky was dream bright. An occasional splash of oars came from the direction of the wooden bridge to the south, so faint that it could have been a rat paddling in the water. There were no trees or streetlights on Rue Gaston Kahn. The road was short, and as they walked north, the tarmac road narrowed into a longtang paved with concrete. They turned into T’in
g-yüan Lane. The Hua Sisters Motion Picture Studio was at the end of the lane.
Behind the wall, the studio was bustling and brightly lit. Park knew nothing about making movies, and he couldn’t understand why Ku had planned this operation. He had looked at the Guide to Film Photography Ku had given him, scratched his head, and asked Ku about it. “Never you mind, just make sure you get us the man and his equipment,” Ku had said.
Before the guard could cry out, Park punched him in the throat. The black wolf dog pounced at him, but Park ducked, slitting it open along its belly with the dagger hidden in his leather jacket. Man and dog fell noiselessly to the ground.
Inside the studio they were working overtime on a movie slated to open in August. The Concession newspapers were already full of reduced-size posters in which Pearl Yeh was draped in a translucent shawl, reminiscent of the spider demon she had played in a previous movie. A thousand years later, she had accumulated enough Tao to be reborn as a beautiful woman. But just as she was about to lure some man to his destruction, a black-cloaked Taoist priest came to warn her against it. On the poster, he was whispering into her ear, his nose about to touch her shoulder, about a university somewhere in Jambudvîpa called Shanghai. The circle of life had sent Yeh to a big city as a university student. She kept causing trouble for herself and everyone around her, but this time she was a modern woman wearing dresses tailored by a White Russian designer.
They crept onto the set and hid in the shadows. No one noticed them because the three floodlights trained on the stage had large reflectors set up all around them. A technician in a white undershirt stood on the frame of the cardboard set with an eight-meter retractable pole in his hand, shining a spotlight directly onto the bathtub. The scenery depicted a bathroom with thin gauze curtains draped over the windows, outside which painted skyscrapers glittered.
But the bathtub was not painted, and the water in the tub was real. Someone hid behind the bathtub pumping fog into it. Pearl Yeh, who was sitting inside the bathtub, was real too. Her shoulders were white, and her knees floated in the water like jellyfish. They said it was worth buying tickets to ten showings in a row, just to see her.
Park hesitated. He stood there. He had never watched a movie from this point of view. You couldn’t see all this on-screen. The camera was propped against the bathtub, and the cameraman was sprawled on the floor. Park was standing behind the reflector, staring at the white shoulders that would appear on-screen in a swirl of steamy mist, but also at the warped refraction of Yeh’s body and her bathing suit. He watched her limbs float in the water.
The intruders squatted down, because most of the film crew was squatting on the ground, and politeness seemed to demand that they follow suit. Park was the only one left standing, except for one man on the opposite corner of the set, who was leaning on the wooden frame, and alternately staring down at his feet and looking up at a couple of sheets of scribbled-on paper on a wobbly table. On the left-hand side of the set there was a single wall with a door. An actor sat on the other side of the wall, getting ready for the moment when he would burst into the bathroom.
The director was talking loudly to the cameraman, and to Yeh. “Maybe we’ll sit you a bit higher up, with your head leaning back and your neck craning even farther back. Close your eyes and let your head sway a little. You’re supposed to be singing. Louder! Don’t you ever sing in the bath?”
“Of course not!” a shrill voice rang out from inside the bathtub.
“Well, imagine you’re a student and you’re relaxing in the shower. Sing out loud! Open your mouth wider!”
Her voice was uglier than Park’s own voice when he was drunk. But it was a silent movie, so all she really had to do was move her lips.
“No one move!” Park cried in his textbook perfect northern accent.
No one paid any attention to him. He sprinted into the spotlight and right up to the bathtub. “Who are you? Get out of here!” someone cried.
Park cocked his Mauser rifle and fired a single shot at the roof of the set. Ku had said he could fire a shot or two. It was a movie set, and none of the neighbors would notice a couple of loud noises. To assert control, you have to come on strong. Watch the director—he’s in charge, and if he defers to you, then you’re in charge.
The light wavered. It was the spotlight on the retractable pole. The technician standing on the frame had nearly fallen off. When the rest of the crew realized what was happening, they threw themselves on the floor for cover. The stage manager, who had been standing on one side of the stage, got down and crouched behind the table. Only Pearl Yeh screamed from where she was inside the bathtub. The bullet had burst a lightbulb, and the glass shattered onto her shoulder. She struggled to push herself up using the edge of the bathtub.
Park hoisted her out of the bathtub and flung her on the floor. Her bathing suit clung wetly to her skin, and the dark outline of her crotch showed beneath it. She curled up on the floor to hide her private parts.
Brandishing his pistol, Park pointed to the cameraman, whom he had picked out right away. “You. Come here.”
Park had Fu drag the cameraman out of that crowd of squatting people and point a gun at him while he got all the equipment he needed to shoot a film. Then he had the cameraman carry his heavy 35 mm camera to the truck. Park pointed to the spools of film on the ground—they would all have to go in the truck too.
“How many hours will these last?” he asked.
No one answered, and Park didn’t really care. They were going to take it all anyway. They hadn’t driven a truck there, because Ku’s sleuthing had revealed that the studio had its own truck, which was always parked outside at night.
Truss them all up, Ku had said. Don’t let anyone leave before three o’clock tomorrow. It’s a small studio, a tiny movie set, and no one will come looking for them. Filmmakers work at night and in the morning they’re all asleep, so no one will come barging in. Tie them up and leave a couple of people to stand guard. Easy.
We’re short-staffed as it is—do we have to do this? Is it really that important? he had asked.
“We do have to. It’s critical,” Ku had said. “You don’t understand how powerful movies can be. Have you heard of Eisenstein, the director of the movie October? They said more people were killed or injured in the making of Eisenstein’s film about the storming of the Winter Palace than during the actual taking of the palace itself. Victory is easily forgotten, and a few deaths are easily forgotten. Only movies will survive.”
All this was incomprehensible to Park, but Ku was happy wondering out loud to himself about a theoretical problem.
A camera could turn one dead man into ten dead men by shifting slightly. It could make death look cleaner, elegant, no convulsions or splattered brains, as if death were a mere symbol. This Park could understand. A camera didn’t have to show a dead person below the shoulders.
He had them all tied up, including Pearl Yeh and the cameraman on the truck. Park tied the actress up himself. They had brought enough rope with them, and he did a thorough job. He tied her hands behind her back, and bound the ropes over her shoulders and under her arms to cross in front of her and loop twice around her thighs, before tying her ankles together in a secure dead knot. The ropes would grow tighter as they dried.
He deposited Pearl Yeh, now a mass of ropes, under the blinding light where the rest of the film crew was huddled together, thoughtfully draping a curtain over her. He left two people there guarding them. There was no need to stuff and gag their mouths. Even in daylight, they wouldn’t dare to make a sound, not with two pistols pointed at them.
There was a tarp draped over the cargo bed. He let the cameraman sit in the passenger’s seat. You had to treat people well if you wanted them to do good work for you. They had plenty of time, so he sat in the driver’s seat and smoked a cigarette. In the early hours of the morning, he would have to drive the truck to Mohawk Road and drop the cameraman off at the stables. Then he would go to Rue Palikao, where Ku would be
waiting for him with another unit.
“How do you hold this thing steady if you’re shooting outdoors? Over your shoulder?” he asked the cameraman.
“There’s a tripod,” the cameraman said.
He had someone get the tripod, which lay in a corner of the studio.
“Will it be stable enough on the truck, even if the truck is moving?” he asked.
“Of course,” the cameraman said proudly. “During the Kuomintang’s military campaigns in the north, I lugged it right onto the battlefields.”
Park clapped him on the shoulder cheerfully, and stuffed a cigarette in the man’s mouth.
CHAPTER 51
JULY 14, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.
4:35 A.M.
Leng ached all over. It wasn’t just that she was exhausted and hungry. She couldn’t turn over, her hands were bound behind her back, and she could only lie on her side. The room was filled with a choking smell of sulfur, which seemed to have coated her nasal membranes with a thin hard shell. But it was her own fault for having turned herself in a second time.
That afternoon, she had run into Li, the most bashful member of Lin’s group, a young man who used to be apprenticed to a pharmacist. They saw each other at the end of the path between Avenue Joffre and the gardens.
“Don’t come in. Ku says you’ve betrayed the cell and are to be shot on sight,” Li said.
“I haven’t betrayed the cell.”